Europe was where Amitabh Bachchan cavorted with the oh-so-delectable Rekha while we, the humble aam-admi people could only follow their capers on screen or in print. The Tata-Birla crowd -- the Adani-Ambani types hadn’t yet entered the Indian imagination -- would of course travel to Europe, but then, they were Tata Birla, not the Mukerjee-Banerjee or Ghose-Bose-Mittir of Calcutta for whom Digha, Puri and Darjeeling was the norm.
Even among those of us who had reached the promised land on F1 visas -- and we were the first real wave of what would later become the backbone of the NRI population of the United States -- the first priority was the coveted Green Card and becoming acceptable to the natives. The short vacations that they were entitled were carefully hoarded for a trip back home, loaded with 'phoren' goods for star-struck, and sometimes jealous, aunts, uncles and cousins. Europe was for rich, 'white', retirees. Not for the desi crowd.
My case was different. I was not looking for a Green Card to stay on in US and I also had a fairly decent job, by Indian standards, back home. That meant a princely Rs 4400 per month -- and a flat on the banks of the Subarnarekha River! By Indian standards, I could afford some luxuries..
This was summer of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of communism, was still six months away, quietly waiting in the wings of history.. The travel company Globus Gateway was offering a 14 day bus tour of western Europe for US$ 1100 per head and after calculating the money that I had and the money that I could get by selling my beloved Mazda 626 I decided that we will go. Perhaps, a once in a lifetime trip to Europe. Little did I know that in another fifteen years -- and thanks to Narasimha Rao's liberalisation and the Y2K driven IT boom -- every Ram-Shyam-Jadu in corporate India would be holidaying abroad. But this was kind of unimaginable in the late 1980s.
Having decided to go to Europe, we started the hunt for the visa. Unlike US citizens who did not need a visa for any country in Europe, poor Indians had to have one to cross every eff*ing international border. There was no unified Schengen visa in those days and we had to get separate visas stamped on our passport from Britain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, West Germany and Holland. There was no email, no internet, no electronic visa. So for each visa we would have to send the two passports by courier -- Federal Express -- along with filled in visa application that had to be requested for in advance. Also the visa fee and the cost of the return courier had to be sent in along with the application in the form of US Postal Service Money Orders.
The order in which we would have to apply for the visa was important. From Britain, we would be flying to Calcutta -- via Abu Dhabi and Dacca -- so they would issue a visa without question, but France would need to see our British visa to know that we could enter Britain from France. Similarly Switzerland would need to see our French visa, Italy would need to see our Swiss visa, Austria would need to see our Italian visa, Germany would need to see our Austrian visa and Holland would need to see our German visa. So, ironically, we had to apply for the visas in the reverse order of our travel route through Western Europe. Since American did not need visas and since hardly anyone from our Indian desi crowd had never travelled to Europe, there was no one to guide us -- and figuring it all out took time, trial, and a lot of guessing. By the time we did, we had two month or barely eight weeks left and seven visas to get! That meant that if we at our end could turn around the passports on the same day, that is send them to the next consulate on the same that we received them from the previous one at our home in Dallas, we should be able to make it.
Fair enough, Britain went through in time and so did France and Switzerland. But Italy threw us a curve ball. They said they would need two weeks to issue the visa and when I called the consulate, in Houston, the fellow at the other end, very, very rudely told me that "If you want to visit Italy, you have to spend two weeks for the visa. Period." Well, what to do? We gritted our teeth and patiently waited for the Italian visa and when the passports finally arrived we rushed them across to the Austrian embassy almost immediately.
Next morning, I called the Austrian embassy in Washington to request them to expedite matters and was very pleasantly surprised when the lady at the other end told us that not only had the visas been issued right in the morning itself but the passports too had already been dispatched. We should be getting them the next day. That was the difference between Austria and Italy and that allowed us make up for the delay that we had suffered in the Italian consulate. We heaved a sigh of relief but that was shortlived.
The next hiccup was Germany, who insisted on seeing our actual flight ticket back to India. We had booked the ticket but since we had not paid for it, we did not have a ticket in hand. So we rushed to our friendly Gujju-bhai travel agent and paid him for the tickets with a cheque. He in turn paid someone in New York with his credit card and then wonder of wonders -- a magic happened. The ticket was issued in New York and immediately an image of the ticket was sent by ZapMail -- that we know today as fax -- to the German embassy in Washington DC. Based on the this image, the German visa was issued and the passports sent back. The last visa of Holland came through without any further excitement and finally we we were ready to board with actually two weeks to spare.
One more big task was the shipment of some of our household goods. These had to be sent to by courier to a shipping agent in New York to be loaded on a freighter ship, yes a sea going ship, that will someday reach Calcutta [ Actually it did and my meshomashai, Dr Santosh Kumar Mukherjee, helped unload it, free it from the dockyard mafia and brought the stuff home, after many many months.]
But there was one important step left. While we had paid for the air-tickets back home, I really did not have the ready cash to pay for the US$ 1100/head for the Globus Tour. That is when I finally sold my Mazda 626, two weeks before our departure and got exactly US$ 2200 in cash that I walked across and paid to my Gujju travel agent to close the deal.
So that was how we visited Europe in 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I do not wish to go into a detailed story of what all we saw because this was a typical, touristy trip where we visited all the usual tourist spots. Indira has written about this trip in her numerous travelogues and there is little point in repeating it once again here.
However there were a few things that stand out in my memory
- The ferry ride from Sheerness, UK to Vlissingen, Holland that we took over the North Sea. Later on, I have travelled on far more luxurious cruise ships in Alaska and Singapore but this was the first and it was memorable.
- Equally memorable was the hovercraft ride from Calais to Dover. The Channel Tunnel - Chunnel - was still in the future.
- The cabaret at the Pigalle district of Paris after which Indira had a bout of remorse for seeing such immoral activities, when all that we saw was a bevy of topless beauties dancing on stage
- Jeanine our tour guide was a really friendly soul. Since Indira was not eating beef, she would arrange for a gigantic egg omlette for her -- equal in cost to the beef dish that she was skipping.
- In Paris, the Louvre was not on our itinerary. Yet we managed to leave the tour bus, managed to find our way across the city using the underground, enter the Louvre, see the Mona Lisa and sprint back to our bus! In retrospect, quite an achievement since we did now French and the French are notoriously rude to those who speak only English.
- The visas that we had so much trouble to get was a source of wonder to the other tourists in our bus. At each border crossing, the two of us would have to step out and get our passports stamped and we collected so many stamps that some of our fellow American tourists felt jealous about.
